External Lighting with Robotiq Camera

Ryan_Weaver

While the built-in illumination on the Robotiq camera may be sufficient for many applications, I expect that others will require external lighting of some type: Backlighting, bar lights, ring lights, DOAL, etc.

With machine vision, when the camera snaps an image it usually triggers an external strobe signal that a lighting controller can use to strobe flash the external lighting in sync with the camera acquisition.  That way the lights don't have to be left on all  the time, and they can be overdriven to achieve greater brightness.  

I think it would be important for future software revisions of the Robotiq camera to be able to trigger a strobe, possibly through the UR digital outputs.  I would be interested to hear if anyone else thinks this would be important.

Samuel_Bouchard

@Annick_Mottard do you see a way to trigger an input at some places in the program tree around the Camera Locate mode to enable this or it would require some modification?

JeanPhilippe_Jobin

@Ryan_Weaver
What would be the benefit of integrating such trigger "inside" the Camera Locate node?

This is something that we could do but I am concerned about managing the exact timing of this trigger with the capture of the image (i.e. depending on the lighting system used, there might be some delay so we would need to include parameters that the user could adjust).

Wouldn't be simpler to use the functions already available on Polyscope; so just set and unset an IO  before and after the Camera Locate node and add wait nodes if necessary? 

Ryan_Weaver

@JeanPhilippe_Jobin  - The typical reason for "strobing" machine vision lighting is so that we can overdrive the LEDs in order to get high brightness without burning out the LEDs over time.  This does require good timing between the camera and the strobe signal.  I can understand how that might be difficult. 

We can certainly turn lights on/off with a digital output using the SET command, but that's not a true strobe.

JeanPhilippe_Jobin

@Ryan_Weaver
Understood. then, would you see other parameters than delay and duration that would be required?
 

Ryan_Weaver

@JeanPhilippe_Jobin That's all I can think of for now - 

JeanPhilippe_Jobin

@Ryan_Weaver ok, thanks.